In my remarks today I’ll be suggesting four particular areas in which, I believe, community is most evident; four particular kinds of priority for those who want to turn society into community. And all of them depend on one foundational assumption; that community occurs when people take responsibility for one another.

When we’re occasionally told ‘We’re all in this together’ (with varying degree of plausibility), that appeals to the sense that a solidarity experience, a community experience, means that what happens to me and what happens to you are not separate issues. My fate and my wellbeing is bound up with yours, and if it is bound up with yours then I have some responsibility for understanding and managing and nurturing that reality.

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The Covenant had been billed as a way to heal the growing splits within Anglican churches over a range of issues that centered on same-sex unions and homosexual bishops.

One of its biggest supporters was Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who backed the covenant’s call to member churches not to take steps or adopt policies that could antagonize Anglicans in other countries.

Failure to abide by the Covenant would result in a kind of second-tier membership for independent-minded member churches.

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Tom Wright, 62, is the only bishop to approach Rowan Williams’ intellectual prowess. He has less range as a thinker than Williams but is a much better communicator. As Bishop of Durham he spent too much time away from the diocese giving lectures at Harvard and elsewhere but was an inspiring figure for younger clergy. Like Rowan Williams he is a genuine spiritual leader and a public intellectual. It is uncertain that he want to leave academia, especially with the defeat of the Covenant in the Church of England, but he is definitely a big beast, one of the very few in the Church of England.

Nick Baines, 53, usually heads the list of younger bishops. He wins admiration for his communication skills but has yet to prove himself as a deep thinker. He probably lacks enough experience and has not yet been tested to prove he has the abilities for Lambeth. In with an outside chance but unlikely to be appointed.

Christopher Cocksworth, 52, has been Bishop of Coventry since 2008. Among the younger bishops, he is a leading candidate….

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